Against Moral Confusion

In the war against terror, our moral clarity is as indispensable as our Special Forces and our F-16s. Let us resolve not to lose it.

September 12, 2002 -- A year and a day later, it is striking how quickly the moral clarity that followed the attacks was beset by moral confusion.

Not everywhere, of course. This time around, The New York Times did not mark Sept. 11 with a celebration of terrorism -- as opposed to Sept. 11, 2001, when the front of the paper's Arts section featured an affectionate profile of former Weather Underground bomber Bill Ayers. "He still has the ebullient, ingratiating manner . . . that made him a charismatic figure in the radical student movement," reporter Dinitia Smith bubbled. These days, The Times takes a different view of terrorists.

But there are other voices -- elite voices, influential voices -- that still cannot quite bring themselves to condemn unreservedly the deliberate slaughter of civilians. To this day, the Reuters news service will not use the words "terror" or "terrorists" (except in quotations) when referring to the horror of September 11. "We all know," its global news editor has explained, " that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

Such fastidious nonjudgmentalism does not reflect careful journalistic objectivity. It reflects a broken moral compass, and it leads to a debased judgmentalism of its own. Last week, Reuters transmitted a six-month-old photo of the attack site in Lower Manhattan, and described it with this grotesque caption:

"Recovery and debris removal work continues at the site of the World Trade Center known as 'ground zero' in New York... Human rights around the world have been a casualty of the US 'war on terror' since September 11."

It is hard to say which is more contemptible: The mocking quotation marks around "War on Terror" or the assertion that that war -- the chief effect of which so far has been the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban -- has harmed "human rights around the world." But that is where you end up if you begin from the premise that there is no moral difference between a freedom fighter and Osama bin Laden.

Americans reacted to the attacks last fall with a tremendous upwelling of patriotic feeling. Love of country, like the country's flag, was on display everywhere. And rightly so.

The jihadis despise us for what we are, not for what we do.

For most of us instinctively understood that the savagery of Sept. 11 was not the result of some injustice we had committed. It could not have been prevented by diplomacy. The hostility of bin Laden and his acolytes, and of the violent strain of fundamentalist Islam that produced them, was not an unintended byproduct of US foreign policy. Like the Nazis and the Communists, the jihadis despise us for what we are, not for what we do. We are the society that has extended more freedom, more tolerance, and more prosperity to more people than any other society in history. That is what they hate. And that is why the mushrooming of American flags last September was exactly the right symbolic response to their atrocity.

But not everyone thought so. "My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window," wrote Katha Pollitt in The Nation, a leading leftist journal. "Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war."

Pollitt is hardly alone. On CNN the other night, Walter Cronkite avowed that US policy abroad "very definitely... could have caused" the massacres in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. The organizers of a 9/11 tribute at the University of California at Berkeley planned to exclude "The Star Spangled Banner" and "God Bless America" as "too patriotic... too centered on nationalism." (Under the pressure of nationwide ridicule, campus officials eventually relented.)

There is little point debating the Pollitts and the Cronkites and the Berkeley organizers and all those who thought that the important question after Sept. 11 was "Why do they hate us?" There are people for whom it is an article of faith that America is always guilty, and if their minds weren't changed when theocratic fascists sent 3,000 innocents to their deaths, their minds will never be changed.

Our enemies are the people who publicly implore Allah to "destroy the usurper Jews and the vile Christians."

But the rest of us must be able to see through their moral fog and remain clear on why and with whom we are at war. Our enemies are the totalitarians who plunged Afghanistan into the Stone Age and who yearn to do the same to America. They are the people who want to stone that young mother in Nigeria, who ordered a Pakistani woman gang-raped as a point of "honor," who drove those Saudi girls back into a burning building because their heads were uncovered.

They are the kind of people who smash ancient statues to prove their piety, who fill the madrassas with poison, who publicly implore Allah to "destroy the usurper Jews and the vile Christians." The kind of people who can shatter buildings but not build them. Who can crush life but not enrich it.

In the war to destroy these people and their evil ideology, our moral clarity is as indispensable as our Special Forces and our F-16s. Let us resolve not to lose it.

The opinions expressed in the comment section are the personal views of the commenters. Comments are moderated, so please keep it civil.

Visitor Comments: 3

(3)
Anonymous,
September 21, 2002 12:00 AM

bias

Unfortunately, humand rights institutions (and the media)tend to forget the grief of those who suffered despicable horrors and or worse blaming the victims themselves for all the catastrophes they are inflicted upon.

(2)
Anonymous,
September 17, 2002 12:00 AM

Reuters main stockholder is Saudi Arabia

Mr. Jacoby - My understanding is that Saudi Arabia owns Reuters - I believe it is the main stockholder of AOL, the server, as well. As a journalist perhaps you can find verification of this and to what extent this is or is not the case for the other news source carriers as well.

I believe the biased and distorted reporting which was/is so endemic in media against Israel is in large measure due to this factor. That combined with a liberal/leftist directed media too often failures to follow basic standards of journalistic objective analysis. News sources - and conspicuously so when Middle East equations are at issue - too often go unquestioned and verification an essential step in reporting of any kind - not taken. It seems those who comprise the media are a constitute power unto itself - answerable not to the public but to their conglomerate corporate owners and its vested financial interests - an authority in which integrity, truth and service to the public has been and continues to be compromised.

Also Moslems infiltrate all human rights and international human rights groups and organizations as defines the communist modus operandi learned from their Soviet Union mentors in an alliance forged and further engineered decades long at the United Nations and practiced at all its forums. Political, cultural, academic, human rights institutions are all targets of the Moslem Arab propaganda machine whether national or international venues) -

Prime example of such tactics is the exploitation of the (NGOs) non-governmental organizations affiliate body of the United Nations into which are insinuated its propaganda agenda namely the one of the Palestinian canard against Israel. (NGOs are credentialed affiliate groups enabled access and participation in United Nations sponsored programs and events, forums, selected seminars, conferences, and at others as non-participating observers.)

This wide array of human rights interest groups, self interest groups taking on a legitimate international tenor as affiliates to the United Nations also serve as conduits for Moslem Arab insinuated and often overriding agendas in which importantly American and others become specific information distribution targets. The feeds from them into media outlets has been highly effective in influencing the Palestinians as victims of Israel perspectives conveyed to the larger public. Further, rights groups in countries with any profile identified with any discipline are also thus targeted by Moslem Arab propagandists in which the Palestinian Arabs as cause celeb become not only a battle cry against Israel but exploitable as a diversionary tactic from the larger agenda - the distraction from the Moslem Arab terrorism component as political weapon, and the globalization of Islam which is directed at destroying western civilization using its own democratic institutions to do it. (Consider that terrorism does not appear in any of these above mentioned venues as an objective topic for consideration, the onslaught against civilian population as a war tactic wrong, and certainly not in association with the Moslem Arabs with their created and exploitable Palestinian Arabs as victims cause celeb. It is rather the vilification of Israel as the victimizer continually in focus. That does not occur without a great deal of financial and logistic and bought institutionalized support.

The very subject of human rights concerns - the practice of it anathema certainly in any of the 22 Moslem Arab countries with not one single democracy - as conveyance for their invectives against Israel and indeed western civilization itself is the ultimate irony.

The modus operandi of targeting human rights groups to militate against Israel though the exploitation of the Moslem Arab creation and sustaining of fellow Moslem Arabs, the so-called Palestinians as refugees and victims of Israel has an additional component in the efforts to undermine and destroy the legitimacy and indeed presence of the State of Israel in the Middle East. That is - Members of Governments listen to human rights groups especially those which have the ear of the media. This is a potent political echelon target of the Moslem Arab propagandist machine which can and does serve to influence governmental policies often in confluence with other factors. Pressure from separate directions but common sources is a workable strategy and the Moslem Arab practice of it in its religions directed war against Israel and the West. It needs telling.

(1)
G. Ron,
September 17, 2002 12:00 AM

Congratulations!

Great! I would like to see more articles like yours!Regards Gershon Ron

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I've been striving to get more into spirituality. But it seems that every time I make some progress, I find myself slipping right back to where I started. I'm getting discouraged and feel like a failure. Can you help?

The Aish Rabbi Replies:

Spiritual slumps are a natural part of spiritual growth. There is a cycle that people go through when at times they feel closer to God and at times more distant. In the words of the Kabbalists, it is "two steps forward and one step back." So although you feel you are slipping, know that this is a natural process. The main thing is to look at your overall progress (over months or years) and be able to see how far you've come!

This is actually God's ingenious way of motivating us further. The sages compare this to teaching a baby how to walk. When the parent is holding on, the baby shrieks with delight and is under the illusion that he knows how to walk. Yet suddenly, when the parent lets go, the child panics, wobbles and may even fall.

At such times when we feel spiritually "down," that is often because God is letting go, giving us the great gift of independence. In some ways, these are the times when we can actually grow the most. For if we can move ourselves just a little bit forward, we truly acquire a level of sanctity that is ours forever.

Here is a practical tool to help pull you out of the doldrums. The Sefer HaChinuch speaks about a great principle in spiritual growth: "The external awakens the internal." This means that although we may not experience immediate feelings of closeness to God, eventually, by continuing to conduct ourselves in such a manner, this physical behavior will have an impact on our spiritual selves and will help us succeed. (A similar idea is discussed by psychologists who say: "Smile and you will feel happy.")

That is the power of Torah commandments. Even if we may not feel like giving charity or praying at this particular moment, by having a "mitzvah" obligation to do so, we are in a framework to become inspired. At that point we can infuse that act of charity or prayer with all the meaning and lift it can provide. But if we'd wait until being inspired, we might be waiting a very long time.

May the Almighty bless you with the clarity to see your progress, and may you do so with joy.

In 1940, a boatload 1,600 Jewish immigrants fleeing Hitler's ovens was denied entry into the port of Haifa; the British deported them to the island of Mauritius. At the time, the British had acceded to Arab demands and restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine. The urgent plight of European Jewry generated an "illegal" immigration movement, but the British were vigilant in denying entry. Some ships, such as the Struma, sunk and their hundreds of passengers killed.

If you seize too much, you are left with nothing. If you take less, you may retain it (Rosh Hashanah 4b).

Sometimes our appetites are insatiable; more accurately, we act as though they were insatiable. The Midrash states that a person may never be satisfied. "If he has one hundred, he wants two hundred. If he gets two hundred, he wants four hundred" (Koheles Rabbah 1:34). How often have we seen people whose insatiable desire for material wealth resulted in their losing everything, much like the gambler whose constant urge to win results in total loss.

People's bodies are finite, and their actual needs are limited. The endless pursuit for more wealth than they can use is nothing more than an elusive belief that they can live forever (Psalms 49:10).

The one part of us which is indeed infinite is our neshamah (soul), which, being of Divine origin, can crave and achieve infinity and eternity, and such craving is characteristic of spiritual growth.

How strange that we tend to give the body much more than it can possibly handle, and the neshamah so much less than it needs!